When next he pulled his lips away from mine, as he had done repeatedly, maddening me, he said, “Now don’t panic.” Then his mouth came back to mine.
“I’m—” I gasped as he lifted his mouth. “Not!” I was drowsy with desire, yet I felt strong, unstoppable. I could have lifted him with one hand.
“Then open your eyes.”
I hadn’t realized they were closed. It seemed I had been watching rainbows spatter down, drop by drop. But now I saw that the air above us was full of whirling, whirring wings. Something whizzed past my head and I flinched, clenching my hands on him.
“Don’t panic,” he said again. His mouth took mine, slowly and carefully, fitting precisely, nuzzling.
My heart was double thumping. I rolled my eyes to look past his head.
Birds. Pigeons were whirling round us. But why?
Then I saw the flames. The flames were pink and blue and violet and green and gold, barely visible in the ordinary way, yet if I looked just right, seeing with an inner eye, they leaped, brilliant, around the pair of us.
I couldn’t deny what I knew, what I felt. We made this fire.
And the birds were hurling themselves through it, spiraling down, then up around us in the tightly choreographed flight of pigeons.
Pyromaniac pigeons, apparently.
“Slowly,” Kama said, seeing that I had become distracted. “Slowly…disengage.”
“I don’t want to!” I sobbed, but we were already disengaging. I let him draw back an inch, a thousand miles, a hundred years, my heart tearing itself open even wider so as not to let him slip out of reach.
The birds loosened the noose of their flight pattern.
Kama and I separated.
Suddenly the birds were gone, skimming away in all directions.
My skin cooled rapidly in the wind off the lake. I found both my feet were on the ground again.
A man with two dogs jogged past us.
Kamadeva took my hand in his and shouldered my heavy document case, and we turned and walked down the bridge.
My apartment building, the Darth Vader, wasn’t far away. Surely this time he would come to me! Surely it was time!
“Kama,” I said at the foot of my big black lakefront tower, turning to him and taking both his hands again.
“Rathi,” he said, looking steadily in my eyes. I read his message.
“No!” I wailed.
He held my gaze. “Are you ready?”
I stamped my foot. “You don’t put every woman through this before you sleep with her!”
He didn’t even blush. “You’re not every woman.”
I punched him on the arm. “Don’t talk to me like that!” I caught my breath on another sob. I felt unstrung and yet wound tight, a crazy feeling. “I won’t be one of your hit-and-run fools!” I realized what that sounded like. “I’m sorry. I—I intend to be one of your hit-and-run women. I really won’t be a problem, I promise,” I added, thinking of the Kamadeva Kult and the would-be high priestess who scared him. “Just don’t—don’t talk as if you need to fool me. You don’t. I just want—”
“Yes?” His eyes had grown sad.
“I just want my first time to be pleasant. To set the bar high, if you like.” I touched his arm more lightly, fearful of reawakening what boiled inside me. “That should flatter you. I know you’re good.”
“Good? Or just good at sex?” His voice was heavy with meaning I couldn’t translate.
I was disappointing him. I could feel it. My chest tightened. “I l-like you for who you are, Kama.” I wished he would…like…me that way.
“Who am I?” He stood very still.
Slowly, I looked him over to buy time. He seemed as wound up as I was, and no wonder, if he felt a tenth of what I felt. I felt insane. Ten minutes ago we had seemed to be joined forever in a moment of transcendent glory.
“What I see, and what I feel, and what I know are all different,” I pleaded.
“What do you see?”
“A beautiful boy. A charmer. A slacker. A deeply kind person with a mixed-up sense of self.”
He took a deep breath. “What do you feel?”
I swallowed. I still couldn’t speak the word love. It was no part of my plan to try to tie him to me the way Lolly-Laura-Lotus Bride wanted to do, and all those girls he had lied to. I just wanted sex.
And to know that he felt like this.
I couldn’t ask it of him.
“Everything,” I said helplessly.
He looked down, as if to hide his eyes and his feelings from me. “And what do you know?”
With those young-old eyes hidden, he looked barely twenty, pretty and shiny as a new penny, and so sweet and sad that my heart heated up again. Then his eyes lifted to mine.
Something was different in him. He seemed to loom before me. Once when I was a small child, at a parade, I took the end of an elephant’s trunk in my hand and played with it—and then looked up to see the rest of the elephant. This was like that.
What did I know?
I could only shake my head.
I ran into my apartment building.
Chapter Fifteen
I needed comfort. I needed my mother’s reassurance that I was her good girl, that I was right to be a good girl. Or something. I rang the house via Skype, but no one answered. Oh, God, I’d called them at five thirty in the morning. I hung up.
It simply killed me to think I was failing Kama. How could I fail him? I was the success. He was the slacker.
Yet he was disappointed in me. It saddened him, and he looked a hundred years older.
I rang my Auntie Lakshmi. She might be vacationing in Greece, but she might also turn her cell phone on.
No answer. I left a message in a voice even I could hear the sobs in. “Auntieji, call me. I’m in such confusion.” I rang off before I could disgrace myself.
Outside my apartment with its expensive view of the lake, clouds were gathering over the horizon. They marched southward like a line of distant mountains toward the city. Sunlight glinted on their puffy curves and crags. Nearer, the sky seemed to thicken from blue to overcast. Gulls zipped past my window. A single pigeon fluttered up and landed on my eighth-floor window ledge and stood there, bobbing, as if trying to peer through the glass.
I thought of the pigeons whirling cyclone-like around our two bodies, mine and Kama’s, where we had stood entwined forever or so it had felt. I covered my face with my hands. My palms smelled of mango flowers…why? When I took my hands away and looked out the window again, the clouds had flown measurably closer.
I still felt the pressure of his hands in my flesh. Was he imagining touching me now, as I was?
My mother was right.
I had violated my own purity.
But what had I done? Really? Just kisses. Rather potent kisses, yes. Maybe if I threw myself on my mother’s mercy, apologized, swore to the truth that we had only kissed, she would forgive, and tell me what in the names of all the gods was happening to me.
Of its own accord, my hand went to restart my call home.
But it wasn’t my mother who answered. My cousin Sunil’s spoiled, sulky face filled the screen. “She’s not here,” he said. “Special meeting with the priests at the temple.”
I groaned. “What about?”
“What do you think? Miss Reincarnated Goddess!” He spat. “The way she’s pouring money into those robbers, there will be nothing left for you to inherit. Did you ever think of that, O Wise One?”
“What did you just call me?” I said sharply.
“Oh, am I not supposed to speak of it to your holiness?” He sneered unattractively. “I humbly beg your pardon.” He laid his palms together and bowed sarcastically, finishing with a very rude gesture. “How does it go over with your American friends, when you tell them to kneel before your superiority because you’re really some ancient forgotten slut?”
“Holy?” I was having trouble breathing. “Sunil—for—did my mother say—”
> “We all know. If it’s supposed to be a secret, why does your mom lord it over all the other women at the temple? Why do the priests suckle at her moneybags? Why does everybody in this family think you know so much, when you don’t even live here? They still don’t want you back, you know. It all came out—you’ve finally located that superfuck god of yours and disgraced the family.”
I was choking by now, unable to do more than gasp for breath, leaning on my desk with one hand and thumping my breastbone with the other. Ironically, this was precisely how my mother had reacted when I told her Kama’s name.
Sunil got up on his knees on my mother’s dining room table and bumped his head on it in front of the computer. “O Rathi, great patron goddess of whores, grant me a boon!” He looked directly at me and snarled. “Get off my back! And don’t think you can tell my mum I have to get a job over holidays!”
Dizziness overwhelmed me. I cut off the call. I fell into my chair, coughing and choking hysterically.
I couldn’t calm down. Every time my body calmed down enough to let me breathe, I thought of Sunil calling me a slut and a goddess, of Kama calling me his long-lost goddess, of my father saying goodbye and looking at me in that way, as if he thought he would never see me again, and I would choke and cough all over again.
I went to the bathroom and drank water and promptly coughed it up. I coughed so much, I was afraid I would pee in my pants. I sat down on the toilet and saw my silky, flowery panties which Kama had given me and remembered how I’d set my panties on fire and then I nearly coughed up a lung.
It wasn’t true. I would form my will around this fact and project it from the center of my body, as I had projected my will when I commanded those witnesses in court yesterday, and I would make it not be true.
That worked for maybe ten seconds.
Then I recalled another corroborative detail.
My mother had lied. I was not betrothed to anyone.
I thought she had lied to keep me from dating here in the United States.
But had she lied to keep me away from sex altogether?
Or to save me for my divine husband?
That thought set me to coughing again.
Finally I went to the kitchen and found a bottle of whiskey my auntie had sent me for graduating law school, nearly ten years ago. It was still unopened. I poured some out and took a swig—and spat that out, too.
But I began to calm down. The whiskey tasted too sweet, but the alcohol seemed to open my throat and settle my trembling chest.
I took another sip and poured the rest down the sink. Then I went to my living room so I could watch the storm come in.
The cloud-mountains had come closer. Far to the north, the suburbs were getting rained on. Nearer, maybe five miles out, lightning flickered over the dark, heaving, whitecapped water. The gulls now looked starkly white against the sky and the lake. They tossed and sliced through the air like curving swords, their yellow beaks pointed fearlessly at the storm.
I was not like them.
I just wanted to crouch here in my darkening apartment, warm, dry, safe, alone.
My mind was quiet.
Maybe my effort of will had worked. I had made it all go away.
In the front hall, in my purse, my cell phone rang. I cringed. Had Sunil confessed to what he told me, and now my mother was calling at last?
Suddenly it all came crashing back, along with blinding rage. I got up and went for my cell phone.
It was Auntie Lakshmi.
I was crying as I answered the call. “Oh, my God, it’s true, Auntieji, Sunil told me, they don’t even want me to come back, he says I—I’m some kind of—he’s my—” I sounded like a madwoman.
Auntie made soothing noises until I stopped babbling.
“First of all, what did that little rat say?”
I told her everything. Kamadeva’s reaction to my ring, and his first delicate kiss, and my panties catching fire, and me attacking him in the restroom at the judge’s chambers, and men buying me drinks, and Papaji saying goodbye, and Mummy lying about the betrothal, and Sunil being so hateful, and Kamadeva’s kisses, oh my God, the kisses. I had thought I would never be able to tell anyone about him, about how he made me feel.
But Auntie Lakshmi was equal to everything, as usual. She just said, “M-hm, m-hm,” as if I were bewailing a mediocre grade in social studies. I began to feel I had been made a fool of. That was all right. I could stand being teased and lied to. What completely freaked me out was the thought that—
“I didn’t tell you because I thought you deserved a chance to say No,” Auntie Lakshmi said.
I stopped breathing.
She said, “You needed to become yourself first. Then, if you like, you can be this goddess you were born to be.”
“Auntieji,” I said, my voice strangling. “Not you, too.”
“Is he nice?” she said.
“What?”
“Your Kamadeva. Is he good to you?”
I blinked. “He’s very kind. He’s cheerful and lazy and he does nothing but meet girls and spend too much on inappropriate clothes—” I broke off. Kamadeva spun in my mind like a beach ball floating on the lake, flashing different colors with every turn.
If, if he really were an unfrocked six-thousand-year-old love god, out of a job, adrift without a wife, he might very well mark time that way.
I shook my head until it rattled. Then I shook my whole body. “Brrr!”
“What, honey?”
“Auntieji, the most unsettling things happen to me. And I feel odd. All the time. I’m—I’m hot inside.” Speaking of it made me aware of the heat. I’d been too upset, too angry and hurt and bewildered, and too desperate to breathe without choking to think about it. But the heat was still down there in my belly, bumping up into my chest with every heartbeat. “It’s terrifying.”
“Have you been keeping up with your yoga?”
“Are you crazy?” I blurted. “I set fire to my clothes! We were kissing today on the bridge and all these birds came—”
I was looking out the window as I spoke. That’s why I saw them—a line of birds, mostly white—pigeons, I could tell, as they arrowed by my window—zipping by my window, turning their bellies toward my window with their little feet tucked up, zooming in like race cars, darting away, then circling near again.
Their whirling circuit angled so close, their wingtips were brushing the glass.
“Oh, no,” I said.
“Oh, no, what?” I heard my auntie say as I dropped the phone.
I moved to the window, reaching out my hands as if I could ward the pigeons away from the hard glass. What if they hit it? In the past, birds had sometimes smacked into my window, falling senseless out of sight, sometimes leaving blood on the glass, and a dusty pattern like the shadow of wings, and it always upset me. My chest clutched up, fearing for them.
“Rathi?” I heard faintly from my phone on the floor.
Fire rose up into my throat. I put both palms out as if to push the birds away.
A cold wind rushed into my face.
That cold wind felt so refreshing, burning up as I was, that I didn’t think about it. I just stood there, cooled and soothed. My eyes closed.
Then a spatter of rain slapped me in the face.
I opened my eyes to see that quite a large hole had been melted in my thick plate glass living room window.
And pigeons were flying through it.
They whirled around me, as they had whirled around me and Kama when we kissed. They dove at my head. I screamed.
But the birds never touched me. They seemed to want to come close to the top of my head.
I remembered all those paintings of saints and buddhas seated in lotus position with their eyes half closed in bliss and blazing rainbows of light fanning out of the tops of their heads.
I didn’t remember seeing any flames.
Flames!
If only I could get rid of this fire inside me!
I fought the
urge to scream and scream and scream.
Instead I let the cold wind cool me. Rain now began smashing through the hole in my window in a steady blast, spattering my face, chilling my skin. I breathed steadily. I tried not to flinch as the pigeons spiraled around me.
The birds wanted to get close to me, I realized. They wanted to fly through my heat, my colors. They had been willing to smack into my window and die to get to me.
My heart filled with compassion.
I held still, feeling the heat rise inside me again and again in long, slow waves. I tried to stay calm. I just let it pass through me.
Steam rose from my skin and my clothes. The birds flew faster when I felt hotter, and they flew slower when I cooled. The fire boiled up. I sent it through me. I let fire boil up through my heart, through my throat, then terrifyingly into my head, past my eyes in a moment that made me fear I was drowning, and ahhh, the relief, the fire shot out the top of my head.
The pigeons dove through my crown of fire.
After a time I couldn’t measure, the circling pigeons slowed down. Their circle widened, skimming around my living room, almost touching the walls.
Then they shot one by one out of the hole in the window, out into the storm.
I found I was soaking wet, trembling with cold.
I sat down on the rain-damp couch and broke into hysterics.
Then I found my phone, which had gone dead. I guessed that my auntie had given up on the conversation.
I reported the window hole to the janitor.
Then I called Lotus Bride. “It’s happened.”
“What happened?”
“My kundalini. It’s up. It’s all the way up.”
She didn’t bother with clucking or asking questions. “Perfect timing. Come right over.” She gave me the address.
I forced myself to shower, using a shower cap to keep my hair from getting any wetter, and changed into dry clothes. I skipped the flowery panties this time. Then I caught a cab to Lotus Bride’s house on the north side.
Chapter Sixteen
It was still raining in Edgewater. Lotus Bride, alias Laura, alias Lolly, lived in a nasty cinderblock four-plus-one apartment building on North Kenmore, in the heart of the north side’s creepy junkie town. I cowered under my umbrella while rain lashed my knees.
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